"This is the first Haiku alpha 1 status update. The goal of this status update is to provide information on how the project is going. There has recently been an consensus that it was about time to start preparing a first alpha for a myriad of reasons. To me personally, the fact that it is about time to show off the enormous amount of work that has been put in the project the past number of years. Another good reason - in my opinion - is to get everyone behind one goal: preparing the code for a first release. So what's the goal of this status update? Well, with a large number of developers actually working on the different components of the operating system, it is easy to lose track of what is going on. You can consider this a news update."

Yeah I am in the same boat as you are. I saw BeOS being demonstrated on ZDTV (now it's G4TV). But didn't try it out until there was a free version of it and was truly amazed at how fast it was much faster than Windows 98. I would also like to see a stable release of this and will be getting something like the Asus EeePC for it. :-)